Jeff Biggers (born in 1963) is an American writer, editor, journalist, playwright, critic, master storyteller and performance artist. He is the author of three books, and co-editor of a fourth.
Biggers has worked as a writer, educator and community organizer across the United States, Europe, India and Mexico. His award-winning stories have appeared on NPR, PRI, CNN, Salon.com, the Washington Post, and in scores of travel, literary and music magazines, and national and foreign newspapers, and various anthologies. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and for Pacific News Service national syndication. His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, the Sierra Club's David R. Brower Award, Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Field Foundation Fellowship, a Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, a Delta Award for Literature in Southern Illinois, and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award. He serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center. In the 1990s, as part of his work to develop literacy and literary programs in rural, reservation and neglected communities in the American Southwest, he founded the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
Biggers is a frequent performer and speaker at festivals, theatres, conferences, universities and schools across the country.
In the 1980s, Biggers served as an assistant to former Senator George McGovern in Washington, DC, and as a personal aide to Rev. William Sloane Coffin at the Riverside Church in New York City. As part of his work with the homeless in New York, Biggers co-founded the Interfaith Assembly on Housing and Homelessness. Born in Ohio, raised in Illinois and Arizona, he earned a B.A. in History and English at Hunter College in New York City. He also studied at the University of California in Berkeley, Columbia University and the University of Arizona.
As the grandson of a coal miner from southern Illinois, Jeff Biggers has also been a vocal critic of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and reckless strip mining across the nation, as well as poorly enforced black lung and mining workplace safety laws, and the fallacy of "clean coal" slogans. Reckoning at Eagle Creek examines the loss of his family's 200-year-old homestead to strip mining, and the historical parallel impact of coal mining on communities and their environment.
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Biggers, Jeff (2011), "Dans La Sierra Madre". Paris: Albin Michel. ISBN 978-2-226-21504-8
Biggers, Jeff (2011), "They'll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle" by Huey Perry. Foreword by Jeff Biggers. Morgantown: WVU Press. ISBN 978-1-933202-79-2
Biggers, Jeff (2010), Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. New York: The Nation/Basic Books. ISBN 978-1568584218 ISBN 1568584210
Biggers, Jeff (2007), In the Sierra Madre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252031016 ISBN 978-0252074998
Biggers, Jeff, (2007), The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. ISBN 1593761511 ISBN 978-1593761516
Biggers, Jeff (2006), In the Sierra Madre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252031016
Biggers, Jeff, (2006), The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. ISBN 1593760310 ISBN 978-1593760311
Biggers, Jeff, Brosi, George and West, Don (2004), No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems by Don West. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252071573
Winner of the Sierra Club's David Brower Award, "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland" is a family saga, part memoir, cultural history and journalistic investigation, examining the impact of coal mining on Biggers' native region of southern Illinois. Dating back to the removal of Native Americans, the nonfiction book laces the history of Biggers' family and the destruction of their 200-year-old historic community in the Shawnee forests into the development of the coal industry, from African slavery and coal mining, to a century of workplace safety and labor union struggles, to environmental and heritage movements against strip-mining and coal-fired plants. According to Publishers Weekly, "Part historical narrative, part family memoir, part pastoral paean, and part jeremiad against the abuse of the land and of the men who gave and continue to give their lives to (and often for) the mines, [Reckoning at Eagle Creek] puts a human face on the industry that supplies nearly half of America’s energy…it offers a rare historical perspective on the vital yet little considered industry, along with a devastating critique of the myth of ‘clean coal.’ ”
The United States of Appalachia argues that beyond its mythology in the American imagination, Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-—a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence, and a hot bed for literature and music. Some of the most quintessential and daring American innovations, rebellions, and social movements have emerged from an area often stereotyped as a quaint backwater. In the process, immigrants from the Appalachian diaspora have become some of our nation's most famous leaders. The Asheville Citizen-Times reviewed it as a "masterpiece of popular history...revelations abound." According to a review in the San Antonio Express-News, the book is "full of historical insights...debunking stereotypes is one of the driving motivations behind Biggers' writing."
In an interview on National Public Radio, Biggers laid out chapters of the progressive history of Appalachia. Specifically, he noted:
∑ Appalachians formed the first District of Washington as a defiant outpost outside of British control
∑ Southern mountain insurgents orchestrated their own attacks on British-led troops, turning the tide of the American Revolution in the South
∑ From an Appalachian hamlet in North Carolina came Nina Simone, who went on to become an international diva with her blend of folk, jazz, and Bach-motif riffs
∑ Adolph Ochs, a young publisher from Chattanooga, took over the New York Times and set its course for world acclaim
∑ Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, one of the 20th century's most important labor leaders, drew from a long-time activist family in West Virginia
∑The first antislavery newspaper in America was founded in Tennessee, and Appalachians trained New England's legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
∑ Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was recognized for her memoirs of West Virginia as much as for her literary contributions to the Far East
∑ Appalachia produced America's first woman muckraker Anne Royall, pioneering social realism author Rebecca Harding Davis, and literary innovators Martin Delany, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, James Still, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, among many others
∑ Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer, invented the first syllabary in modern times
∑ Blues icons, Bessie Smith and WC Handy, emerged from Appalachia's rich African American musical traditions
∑ Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee galvanized the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement
In the Sierra Madre is a memoir and narrative nonfiction history that chronicles the life and times in one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the native Raramuri/Tarahumara, Biggers examines the ways of a resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of the Mexican mountaineers, and the parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, hidden Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters like Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo and Pancho Villa, Biggers searches for the legendary treasures of the Sierra Madre (Mexico's Copper Canyon). In the Sierra Madre won the Gold Medal in Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards (Travel Essays) in 2006. The memoir was praised by Booklist as "an astonishing sojourn." The San Antonio Express-News reviewed that it was "full of historical insights, and unforgettable characters."
As an outspoken critic of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and strip mining in the Midwest and American Southwest, Biggers has written extensively for various newspapers, magazines and blogs. He has cited the dual impact of stripmining on destroying both the environment and its inhabitants and their heritage. In an article for Salon.com , Biggers has also explored alternatives to coal mining in the coalfield regions, including a proposed industrial wind farm on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. In several blogs for the Huffington Post, Biggers has appealed to President Barack Obama, and Vice President Al Gore, among others, for their help in bringing green jobs to the Appalachian coal fields.
In the Washington Post, Biggers challenged the concept of "clean coal," by examining the extraordinary human and environmental costs of extracting coal, and the still infeasible technologies available for carbon capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions at coal-fired plants. As a cultural historian, Biggers often explores the devastating impact of mining on uprooting local communities, cultures and histories.
Biggers is also a playwright, whose first play, "4½ Hours: Across the Stones of Fire," explores the fate of a young couple threatened by an impending mountaintop removal mining operation in their community. Produced by the Coal Free Future Project, a collective of artists, actors, filmmakers and musicians co-founded by Biggers, the play has toured nationally and appears on Off Broadway at the Gene Frankel Theatre in New York City on June 4–13, 2010.
freenewmexican.com/news/51243.html "Where Myth is Life"; Free New Mexican newspaper, Santa Fe. Attempt to retrieve article 2010-02-26 unsuccessful. Referred to http://www.santafenewmexican.com and searches by author and title unsuccessful.
In the Sierra Madre interview on NPR's Latino USA, http://www.latinousa.org/program/lusapgm718.html Attempt to retrieve interview 2010-02-26 unsuccessful. No search capacity at site.